[LINK] David Kopel on Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

[rfmcdonald]

Libertarian David Kopel posted a review at the group blog The Volokh Conspiracy of Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, a documentary on the life of Gore Vidal that I'd seen this February. Kopel quite approves of the man and the documentary both.

Many people first saw Vidal in 1968, when Vidal and Buckley were commentators for ABC News during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The scene outside the convention hall looked like the last days of the Roman Republic. Abbie Hoffman and other “Yippies” successfully carried out their plan to turn peaceful protests against the Vietnam War into a riot; Mayor Richard Daley and his Chicago police department reciprocated by staging, in effect, a counter-riot, beating rioters, law-abiding protesters, the media, and others indiscriminately. On ABC, Buckley expressed his disgust with people who were expressly supporting the killing of American troops in Vietnam; Vidal then called Buckley a “crypto-fascist,” and Buckley fired back, “Listen, you queer.” Vidal was an early and ardent advocate of gay liberation, but he had not yet revealed his own personal sexual identity to the public.

Vidal delighted in acerbic criticism of anyone who disagreed with him, so Amnesia is filled with his barbs–some of them brilliant, some of them self-indulgent.

From the Truman administration to the present one, Vidal was a relentless critics of the national security state. He called himself an “anti-anti-communist,” and spoke forcefully against the mass surveillance society which has been created in the name of national security. My only contact with Vidal involved a November 1998 article he wrote for Vanity Fair, “The War at Home.” As the summary of the article states, “The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.” Compared to now, those were the good old days for privacy.

According to Vidal, my co-author Paul Blackman and I had “written the best and most detailed account of the American government’s current war on its unhappy citizenry in No More Wacos: What’s Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It.” Vidal even sent me a nice letter. For me, that was a good lesson in how it’s possible to find common ground with someone whom you disagree with on many other issues. So when you think that somebody is wrong about nearly everything, it’s best to argue against their ideas, rather than anathematizing them personally.